Small business

As the year draws to a close, it’s time to reflect upon the good, the bad and the ugly in this year. We did a really cool segmentation and ethnography project that helped define buyer and user personas. That was great fun. We did a bunch of pricing research on … Read More

I have been invited to give a talk to some MBA students about life in the startup landscape. I reflected on my experience and boiled it down to these bullets. Do they match your experience? I’d love to hear what you think. Be audacious. Aim very high and fail sometimes. … Read More

I attended Product Camp in Boston over the weekend and the topic of where product management should live in an organization came up once again. I had a blog post about this on my abandoned old blog, so I dragged it out and looked at it. I realized I now … Read More

This is the eighth post in my Customer Research series. What is a beta program? The Wikipedia has the following definition: “Beta” is a nickname for software which has passed the alpha testing stage of development and has been released to users for software testing before its official release. It … Read More

When is a startup no longer a startup? Is a company looking to scale its business a small business operating at a loss, or a startup in search of growth? It seems that there is no commonly accepted definition of the term “startup”, as evidenced by this FAQ from answers.onstartups.com. … Read More

Happy New Year! Here are my New Year’s resolutions. What do yours look like? Live more in the moment and enjoy what we have. Celebrate small victories. Spend more time listening and less time talking. Pause longer before reacting. Socialize and help facilitate socialization at work while maintaining productivity. Make … Read More

Finally caught up on my reading after a nice long weekend. Here are some good articles from last week. Enjoy. Trading deals: a lost art Fear of bad ideas Releasing early is not always good? Heresy! Valuation metrics: what’s your company worth? Early adopters don’t make your market Stealth startups, … Read More

Here are 10 great articles I read last week. Enjoy and have a good weekend. What is being a startup really about? 10 common mistakes that startups and small companies make How to eat a five hundred pound marshmallow A VC’s advice on how to pitch VC’s Comments are the … Read More

Last night I went to a holiday party with a bunch of ex-coworkers from one of my prior lives. As we caught up with each other and shared memories about funny people we knew and funny things we did, I had an incredible sense of community. Here we were, many … Read More

It’s party time! If you want to make your company’s holiday party stand out in memory, consider borrowing a page from one of my previous employers featured below. I promise your employees will be talking about it for years to come. Do a harbor cruise and neglect to note the … Read More